Wireless interconnectivity is becoming increasingly pervasive in a myriad of devices across many different environments. For example, pursuit of the so-called “internet of things” may result in wireless computing technology being embedded in many different types of objects, from shoes to refrigerators in consumer environments and from manufacturing equipment to inventory management containers in commercial environments. With the mushrooming of wireless interconnectivity, various devices may have significantly different native capabilities or may have direct access to dramatically different network features. If such capabilities or features were to be restricted to their respective devices, potential benefits of expanding wireless interconnectivity would be appreciably limited.
One example wireless interconnectivity scheme to permit communication among various devices is the Neighbor Awareness Networking (NAN) (or Wi-Fi Aware™) program being standardized by the Wi-Fi Alliance. (WFA). Within the NAN protocol stack the MAC is responsible for acquiring and maintaining time and frequency synchronization among devices that are dose by, so that the devices can be available to perform discovery protocol message exchanges in the same channel at the same time. Synchronization among the devices occurs through dedicated synchronization frames that are transmitted by so-called master devices at the beginning of availability periods (or discovery windows). Synchronization frames are transmitted periodically in certain channels. Periodicity and channel usage is determined by parameters set forth within a synchronization frame, Within a NAN network, each device typically needs to be capable of acting as a master device, and each device is expected to determine for each availability period whether it is a master device or not. The synchronization frames determine the schedule (time and frequency) of both the synchronization frame transmissions and the availability periods or discovery windows.